Family Values According To The Sopranos

Chris Seay Isn't Just Any Fan. He's A Minister Who's Found An Unlikely Spiritual Message In The Mob Drama.

August 23, 2002|By Mark I. Pinsky, Sentinel Staff Writer

Like millions of Americans, Chris Seay was hooked after watching just a few episodes of The Sopranos, HBO's hit series.

"The characters were so real, so true to life," he recalls. "They were truly flawed heroes, and that is compelling to me."

The saga of an Italian-American family living in northern New Jersey is characterized by award-winning writing and acting. It is also drenched in blood, sex, greed, crime and, most of all, the angst of its protagonist, Mafia boss Tony Soprano.

What makes Seay, 30, different from other fans of the series is that he is a Christian minister. And still he expects to rush home from his Houston church when the show's fourth season opens Sept. 15.

He won't be alone. Eleven million households tuned in to the final episode of The Sopranos' third season, a significant audience for cable, but about half as many viewers as a hit network series such as ER, CSI or Friends might pull.

The Sopranos' following, however, is both intense and influential, including television critics and opinion makers such as Seay, who also contributes to the online magazine salon.com.

"Who would have guessed that you would have found the great American epic in the Jersey suburbs?" asks Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University's Center for Popular Television.

Seay admits that the mob opera was initially a guilty pleasure, discovered during a one-month free promotion for HBO. Despite its abundant profanity and nudity, he says he was captivated by the complex characters and the intense narrative. He was also embarrassed.

"What is my wife going to think that I'm watching when she walks into the room?" he recalls worrying -- for good reason.

At first, his wife was troubled by his growing affection for the show. She wondered whether it was right for an educated person with a spiritual calling to consume such a large weekly dose of obscenity and violence.

Soon, though, he convinced his wife, Lisa, that he was all right, that The Sopranos is, at its essence, about "faith, forgiveness and family values."

The appeal of the show is undeniable to this man of God. So much so that he felt compelled to link the unlikely, turning out an intriguing spiritual meditation. The Gospel According to Tony Soprano: An Unauthorized Look Into the Soul of TV's Top Mob Boss and His Family will be published Tuesday by Relevant Books, based in Lake Mary.

The tactic of using popular culture to drive home spiritual messages has a long history.

"If one goes back and systematically looks at all of American popular culture in terms of religion, and how each one can illuminate the other, I think it's a perfectly fine exercise," says Thompson. "It's certainly an exercise the medieval theologians performed perpetually."

In his modern-day treatise, Seay writes: "The Sopranos serves as a prescription for the soul. It has the power to condemn or restore." It also manages to show human beings at their brutal worst, and those same characters at their humane best.

"To misread The Sopranos as a glorification of violence or a cheap comedy about middle-class America is to not read it at all," he writes. "Like all art, it must be interpreted."

The Sopranos as a philosophical teaching tool? Some observers welcome the notion.

"While so many religious culture-watchers are offended by the sex and violence in Sopranos, I tend to prefer stories that are real," says Teresa Blythe, co-author of Watching What We Watch: Prime-Time Television Through the Lens of Faith.

"If someone is going to do a treatment of the mob, it would be quite unreal for it not to include depictions of the depravity resulting from a life of crime," she says. "Shows like The Sopranos are excellent reminders that we really do reap what we sow."

Not all theologians are convinced by Seay's approach.

"Christians need to be concerned with culture in general and pop culture specifically," says Steve Brown, professor of communication and practical theology at Reformed Theological Seminary in Oviedo. "But I would have some real problems with trying to draw on values from a television program that are totally different from what I as a Christian believe -- except in an adversarial way."

If anyone can make this combination work, it would be Seay, says Mark Wingfield, managing editor of The Baptist Standard, an official publication of the Baptist General Convention of Texas.

"Chris is the kind of person who is very capable of connecting with people through popular culture," says Wingfield, "and then drawing them into the Gospel and faith discussions."

EVIL ELEVATESSeay's interpretation draws on the Bible and other sources to argue that the award-winning series is "subversive and transforming," and that "a show about so much evil and depravity can actually uplift us."

The Sopranos compels involvement, he contends.

"This show does not command imitation; it requires contemplation," he says. "One naturally begins to examine his life, family relationships, finances, and the God who created man in this miserable state.